Eibonvale Press has been quiet lately while I treated myself to some much needed R&R – but now it is starting to wake up from it’s slumbers and there is new news in the air!

Pleasant Tales by Brendan Connell

I am happy to present a new collection by a familiar face here at Eibonvale press – Brendan Connell. Pleasant Tales – a follow-up to his earlier Unpleasant Tales (one of Eibonvale’s most successful titles) – is now available to preorder, complete with one of our special offers to get things going. The author has provided an exclusive chapbook entitled Curious Births to Light the Universe, limited to just 50 copies. Buy a hardcover of Pleasant Tales and you will get the chapbook for free while it lasts; we have also prepared a bundle deal with the paperback. You can find full information on the Eibonvale website (link below). I expect this to be a fairly brisk seller (some have already gone before I could even announce it!), so I would suggest that you head on over and grab a copy!

And lastly a quick announcement of some future projects. I am in the process of updating the website (oh boy did it need it!) – including the ‘forthcoming’ section. So it is now a matter of public knowledge that more books are on the way. No going to sleep again now!

We have a new collection by Rosanne Rabinowitz, which will be released near the end of this year. And that will be followed by another familiar face – Douglas Thompson and his remarkable novel Barking Circus. Watch this space for info on these!

In addition, news that might be of interest to writers will be following shortly!

In the hectic time leading up to the publication of Rustblind and Silverbright, our anthology of railway-themed slipstream and horror, I have invited short blog contributions from the authors included in that book, which I will be publishing at irregular intervals over the next month or two. Next in the series is Eibonvale regular Douglas Thompson with a characteristically metaphysical and thoughtful musing on the nature of the familiar railway station . . .

Stations are How Towns Dream.

by Douglas Thompson

Stations are how towns dream.

If you are lucky enough to have one of those Victorian ones left over, not crushed and brushed away under the onslaught of sixties modernism and brutalism that swept through our world like a rabid brontosaurus and lurched off around the corner of our minds in a hazy childhood cloud of half-remembered concrete dust. If you have a real station building with timber trellised eaves and cast-iron fretwork of interlacing beams like corset work, you’ll know that you are licensed to dream there, and that as you do: the town and all the long-dead men who built it are dreaming with you.

At its station, the limits of a town’s identity cease in a wistful demarcation, a petering out, and the town dreams of being by the seaside, or at the foot of a Highland glen. The station dreams of being Euston, Paris Gare Du Nor, Istanbul, a gateway to the Orient, its cool marble slabs spattered with the exotic spices of foreigners gabling in obscure tongues like music. The word ‘gay’ becomes somehow innocent and playful again under the canopies of a true station, built in the golden age when the world first became aware of itself and its true extent. There is something forever festive and celebratory in the architecture, like frozen flags and buntings. We are all going somewhere, or someone much beloved is coming home again after a long trial. An exciting beginning or a happy ending.

In stations, the buildings themselves dream that they are not bound to the ground by foundations, that like us they might up sticks, gird their loins, and shimmy off towards the far horizons drawn by the sight of a wistful puff of summer cloud that says “Escape”. Station architecture dreams of timber bathing huts by the seaside, of Alpine villas and the bracing air of snowfields and natural springs.

And what of the towns themselves that we glimpse from these stations as we pass on through in the train? We see them from above, we see their roofs beneath which their citizens sleep in harmonious rows like well-behaved children. Their dead sleep there too, in their graveyards, and the dead have left their stories woven around the thousand chimney pots like drifting smoke. The living citizens each think they are unique and new as they walk around like little toy soldiers and dolls in their perfect town that the dead have left them. But bit by bit, the buildings themselves and the stories they have encoded, re-take the citizens in their dreams as they sleep at night, and make them one with the town itself, the town’s true, immortal character. History repeats itself like a stained-glass window through which each day’s new sun must shine. The colours change but the pattern is so beautiful that it creates itself, it seems always to have existed, as all great art must.

A town is a living entity, which while its citizens themselves must know birth and death, it can know neither. People are like light bulbs, newspapers, matches, a tide of necessary ephemera which comes and goes, swept in and out at its stations. What is left behind and what endures is the town, its spirit and character and hope, the character of humanity and of the earth itself, which is indomitable and indestructible. Therefore never despair of your own life and fate, but know this: that you are not the matches burnt or the paper discarded on the wind. You are the town itself, its very bricks, part of it and all of it.

So if you have any interest in any of those then I suggest you don’t delay. Once they run out they will be back to full price!

In addition to that, it is worth noting that both the Thompson books are down to single copies in hardcover and as far as I can tell these are the last ‘first edition’ copies to be available. The second edition came along when slightly updated versions were released, but there is not much difference between them. However, if you care about such things, this is probably the last chance to get a copy of either book without ‘Second Edition’ written inside.

Douglas Thompson’s Sylvow racked up a couple of nice new reviews. It seems that each new reader has a different take on the book.

First, at Warpcore SF, Ros Jackson praises the moral ambiguity about Nature, where Regina de Burca (Future Fire) had wanted a clearer ecological answer to mankind’s problems. Ros is the first person to notice how adultery is used as a metaphor for environmental destruction.

One of her comments:

“Although there’s a section in the middle where Douglas Thompson seems to be on the verge of reiterating a few trite platitudes about respect for nature and man’s blindness to natural beauty, he soon expands the debate into something much more wide-ranging and ambiguous in its conclusions.”

Next, at Exaggerated Press, Terry Grimwood praises the strength of the character development, and sees Nature’s onslaught not necessarily as pessimistic (in the way Regina did) but as an evolution and transformation.

One of Mr. Grimwood’s comments:

“This novel is reminiscent of the disaster stories of J G Ballard, the most obvious comparison being The Crystal World. However, Douglas Thompson is very much his own man and the style, imagery, and the sheer surrealism of the novel’s latter segments (with piratical raiders controlling great swathes of the ravaged city) are most definitely products of a very fertile imagination.”

Douglas Thompson’s Sylvow received an enthusiastic review at Rising Shadow.

Quote:

“If you’re fed up with mainstream science fiction, Sylvow will offer you a different kind of reading experience, because it’s a weird and fascinating combination of horror, science fiction, environmental issues and philosophical elements. Sylvow is one of the weirdest books I’ve read, but it’s weird in a good way.”